How to abort a particular task in bull queue? - node.js

According to this package https://github.com/OptimalBits/bull is it possible, to abort a certain task in the "waiting queue"?
My use-case is as follows:
I have a mongodb collection "users" and a collection "friendship" where I store name and avatar of both users. So I only need one query to get friendlist of a certain user. When a user changes his avatar, I have to update all documents within this user in "friendship" collection. This is a performance-uncritical operation since I want it to do in background and consistency is not important for this use-case. But when a User updates his avatar several times in a short time span, I want to cancel all referencing old tasks (for updating the friendship collection) except the newest. Is this with bull possible?
Thanks in advance, I would appreciate every information about that.

Looking at the Bull reference you will find that there is a Job.remove() method. Since you haven't posted any code I could only guess how it looks like. Hence I have described what you could do.
However what you have to do is to store the Promise<Job> which will be returned by Queue.add() for instance in a Map<string, Map<string, Promise<Job>>. String would be the _id of your user and Promise<Job>[] is an array containing all the queued jobs for a specific user. Once a Job has been resolved (you can await the resolved job with Job.finished()) you need to remove the Promise from your Map.
Whenever a user changes his avatar you could then look into your Map if you need to remove any jobs. The value in the above mentioned Map is another Map (key is a string, which represents the JobId) which easily allows you to remove Jobs by JobId. That may sound a bit complex, but don't be afraid - if you understand how Maps work it shouldn't be a problem :-).

Related

Prevent DELETES from bypassing versioning in Amazon QLDB

Amazon QLDB allows querying the version history of a specific object by its ID. However, it also allows deleting objects. It seems like this can be used to bypass versioning by deleting and creating a new object instead of updating the object.
For example, let's say we need to track vehicle registrations by VIN.
INSERT INTO VehicleRegistration
<< {
'VIN' : '1N4AL11D75C109151',
'LicensePlateNumber' : 'LEWISR261LL'
} >>
Then our application can get a history of all LicensePlateNumber assignments for a VIN by querying:
SELECT * FROM _ql_committed_VehicleRegistration AS r
WHERE r.data.VIN = '1N4AL11D75C109151';
This will return all non-deleted document revisions, giving us an unforgeable history. The history function can be used similarly if you remember the document ID from the insert. However, if I wanted to maliciously bypass the history, I would simply delete the object and reinsert it:
DELETE FROM VehicleRegistration AS r WHERE VIN = '1N4AL11D75C109151';
INSERT INTO VehicleRegistration
<< {
'VIN' : '1N4AL11D75C109151',
'LicensePlateNumber' : 'ABC123'
} >>
Now there is no record that I have modified this vehicle registration, defeating the whole purpose of QLDB. The document ID of the new record will be different from the old, but QLDB won't be able to tell us that it has changed. We could use a separate system to track document IDs, but now that other system would be the authoritative one instead of QLDB. We're supposed to use QLDB to build these types of authoritative records, but the other system would have the exact same problem!
How can QLDB be used to reliably detect modifications to data?
There would be a record of the original record and its deletion in the ledger, which would be available through the history() function, as you pointed out. So there's no way to hide the bad behavior. It's a matter of hoping nobody knows to look for it. Again, as you pointed out.
You have a couple of options here. First, QLDB rolled-out fine-grained access control last week (announcement here). This would let you, say, prohibit deletes on a given table. See the documentation.
Another thing you can do is look for deletions or other suspicious activity in real-time using streaming. You can associate your ledger with a Kinesis Data Stream. QLDB will push every committed transaction into the stream where you can react to it using a Lambda function.
If you don't need real-time detection, you can do something with QLDB's export feature. This feature dumps ledger blocks into S3 where you can extract and process data. The blocks contain not just your revision data but also the PartiQL statements used to create the transaction. You can setup an EventBridge scheduler to kick off a periodic export (say, of the day's transactions) and then churn through it to look for suspicious deletes, etc. This lab might be helpful for that.
I think the best approach is to manage it with permissions. Keep developers out of production or make them assume a temporary role to get limited access.

How to account for a failed write or add process in Mongodb

So I've been trying to wrap my head around this one for weeks, but I just can't seem to figure it out. So MongoDB isn't equipped to deal with rollbacks as we typically understand them (i.e. when a client adds information to the database, like a username for example, but quits in the middle of the registration process. Now the DB is left with some "hanging" information that isn't assocaited with anything. How can MongoDb handle that? Or if no one can answer that question, maybe they can point me to a source/example that can? Thanks.
MongoDB does not support transactions, you can't perform atomic multistatement transactions to ensure consistency. You can only perform an atomic operation on a single collection at a time. When dealing with NoSQL databases you need to validate your data as much as you can, they seldom complain about something. There are some workarounds or patterns to achieve SQL like transactions. For example, in your case, you can store user's information in a temporary collection, check data validity, and store it to user's collection afterwards.
This should be straight forwards, but things get more complicated when we deal with multiple documents. In this case, you need create a designated collection for transactions. For instance,
transaction collection
{
id: ..,
state : "new_transaction",
value1 : values From document_1 before updating document_1,
value2 : values From document_2 before updating document_2
}
// update document 1
// update document 2
Ooohh!! something went wrong while updating document 1 or 2? No worries, we can still restore the old values from the transaction collection.
This pattern is known as compensation to mimic the transactional behavior of SQL.

MongoDB merge one field into existing collection with Map/Reduce

I have a MongoDB database with 2 collections:
groups: { group_slug, members }
users: { id, display name, groups }
All changes to groups are done by changing the members array of the group to include the users ids.
I want to sync these changes across to the users collection by using map/reduce. How can I output the results of map/reduce into an existing collection (but not merging or reducing).
My existing code is here: https://gist.github.com/morgante/5430907
How can I output the results of map/reduce into an existing collection
You really can't do it this way. Nor is this really suggested behaviour. There are other solutions:
Solution #1:
Output the map / reduce into a temporary collection
Run a follow-up task that updates the primary data store from the temporary collection
Clean-up the temporary collection
Honestly, this is a safe way to do this. You can implement some basic retry logic in the whole loop.
Solution #2:
Put the change on a Queue. (i.e. "user subscribes to group")
Update both tables from separates workers that are listening for such events on the queue.
This solution may require a separate piece (the queue), but any large system is going to have such denormalization problems. So this will not be the only place you see this.

How to update fields automatically

In my CouchDB database I'd like all documents to have an 'updated_at' timestamp added when they're changed (and have this enforced).
I can't modify the document with validation functions
updates functions won't run unless they're called specifically (so it'd be possible to update the document and not call the specific update function)
How should I go about implementing this?
There is no way to do this now without triggering _update handlers. This is nice idea to track documents changing time, but it faces problems with replications.
Replications are working on top of public API and this means that:
In case of enforcing such trigger you'll have replications broken since it will be impossible to sync data as it is without document modification. Since document get modified, he receives new revision which may easily lead to dead loop if you replicate data from database A to B and B to A in continuous mode.
In other case when replications are fixed there will be always way to workaround your trigger.
I can suggest one work around - you can create a view which emits a current date as a key (or a part of it):
function( doc ){
emit( new Date, null );
}
This will assign current dates to all documents as soon as the view generation gets triggered (which happens after first request to it) and will reassign new dates on each update of a specific document.
Although the above should solve your issue, I would advice against using it for the reasons already explained by Kxepal: if you're on a replicated network, each node will assign its own dates. So taking this into account, the best I can recommend is to solve the issue on the client side and just post the documents with a date already embedded.

Processing a stream in Node where action depends on asynchronous calls

I am trying to write a node program that takes a stream of data (using xml-stream) and consolidates it and writes it to a database (using mongoose). I am having problems figuring out how to do the consolidation, since the data may not have hit the database by the time I am processing the next record. I am trying to do something like:
on order data being read from stream
look to see if customer exists on mongodb collection
if customer exists
add the order to the document
else
create the customer record with just this order
save the customer
My problem is that two 'nearby' orders for a customer cause duplicate customer records to be written, since the first one hasn't been written before the second one checks to see if it there.
In theory I think I could get around the problem by pausing the xml-stream, but there is a bug preventing me from doing this.
Not sure that this is the best option, but using async queue was what I ended up doing.
At the same time as I was doing that a pull request for xml-stream (which is what I was using to process the stream) that allowed pausing was added.
Is there a unique field on the customer object in the data coming from the stream? You could add a unique restriction to your mongoose schema to prevent duplicates at the database level.
When creating new customers, add some fallback logic to handle the case where you try to create a customer but that same customer is created by another save at the same. When this happens try the save again but first fetch the other customer first and add the order to the fetched customer document

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